Lilac City Studio is pleased to present Recreation II an exhibition of paintings by Sydney artist Kyra Henley.

Henley constructs paintings through a process of collage to create new and absurd narratives. Images sourced from magazines, and books of the 1950s, 60s and 70s are recontextualised to create unfamiliar landscapes of familiar images. These faux-realities become eerie masks to the destruction & darkness of the Post-War World from which the images come, the highly saturated pallet and incredible level of detail adding to this sense of facade.

Lilac City Studio is pleased to present 'Currency', an exhibition including works by Ann Hirsch, Signe Pierce & Alli Coates, Marian Tubbs, and JD Reforma. These works are curated around a central theme of VALUE. This theme is explored within gender & sexuality, material & the body.

Anne Hirsch is a video and performance artist, who examines the influence of technology on popular culture and gender. Her immersive research has included becoming a YouTube camwhore with over two million video views and an appearance as a contestant on Frank the Entertainer...In a Basement Affair on Vh1. She was awarded a Rhizome commission for her two-person play Playground which debuted at the New Museum and was premiered by South London Gallery at Goldsmiths College. Hirsch has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Recent solo shows include MIT List Visual Arts Center and the New Museum’s online project space First Look.

Signe Pierce is an American multimedia artist working between New York and Los Angeles. She has worked in performance, photography, video and digital art. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, at the New Museum, New York, and at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Pierce has a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.

Alli Coates is a multimedia artist based in New York City and Los Angeles. She has been privileged to work with some of the top international brands and publications in the world, including Helmut Lang, Theory, Uniqlo, MAC Cosmetics, Diane Von Furstenberg, L'Oréal, and many others. Her photography and design work has appeared in Vogue, W, Dazed and Confused, VICE Magazine, GQ, New York Magazine, Complex, and ELLE.

People Who Are dubbed her a "Creative Ninja," due to her flexibility in mediums: photography, video art, print design, window installations, web design, and art direction.

Alli grew up in Manassas, VA, graduated with a BFA from George Mason University in Washington DC, and now works between New York City and Los Angeles.

Marian Tubbs' assemblage-based installations and digital works critique cultural ascriptions of value and act to slow down accelerated modes of looking. Her work unveils poetic and political power inside an emotional reservoir of discarded images, poor materials, and ‘small’ talk. Natural and ‘fake’ imagery is captured in numerous randomised fluid and static visions. Discarding the use of hierarchy to preference various elements, the fragile and found are assembled to defiantly assert: ‘the poor material is my agent because it is set to fail at being ‘fine’’.

Tubbs has recently curated shows including "Care" (with Dana Kopel) at Interstate Projects, NY and "Witness" at Minerva, Sydney. In 2017 Tubbs was the recipient of the Marten Bequest Scholarship for sculpture, and in 2015 MCA's 'Online Commission'. Tubbs’ work is held at the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Contemporary Art and International institutional collections. In 2017 her work was included in the recent anthology 'Australiana to Zeitgeist' publishied by Thames and Hudson. In 2014, she contributed as an author to the philosophy volume "Deleuze and Guattari and the Arts: Intensities & Lines of Flight,” published by Rowman & Littlefield International. In 2015 she completed a PhD at UNSW Art & Design. She is a lecturer in Photomedia at the National Art School. Right now she is working on her first artist publication and an music video for rapper DonChristian.

JD Reforma is an interdisciplinary artist who mines personal and public histories to explore the decolonising potential of the Filipino. His works occupy the interstice between the popular and the political, collecting and collaging narratives of diasporic experience as a methodology towards unpacking and unlearning cultural shame.

BODY/BLOOD brings together the work of artists; Dylan Batty, Dominic Byrne, Athena Thebus and Siena White.

These artists’ assemblages create atmospheres of intimacy through the curation of their installations. Their practices involve an experimental and expansive use of materials and an exploration of the meaning embedded within them to enrich the content of their work. Between the artists lies an interest in identity, representing the self & the body’s implication within this.

The works each explore themes upon which their experience of self-representation is contingent, including personal heritage, gender, and the mediums through which self- representation takes place. The playful way in which the artists explore these ideas is cut by the weight of an underlying eeriness that exposes the complexities in exploring the body & self.

By placing these practices in conversation we hope to provide a space of contemplation on how material, text, tension & texture can create works rich & thick with feeling.

Dylan Batty is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and racing car designer living and working on occupied Darramurragal Land. Sovereignty was never ceded. Their practice is based heavily within the post Internet conceptualism, examining the Internets heavy reliance on intimacy and remediation, while also investigating the logistics of art in a wider context.

Athena Thebus’ practice spans sculpture, installation, and writing. Her practice is driven by the desire to generate atmospheres thick with past shame and queer hope. The works have an undercurrent of celestial Catholicism as influenced by her Filipino mother. Presently, her writing practice involves swimming in other people’s waters and learning what it means to be a prince subservient to queens. She is a Scorpio with a Sagittarius rising and a Capricorn moon.

Siena White is an artist, curator and teacher whose multidisciplinary practice was born from traditional foundations in drawing & sculpture. Her practice is driven by an interest in how identity and perception of self is affected by environment. Siena uses observations from her own life working as an assistant to Stockbrokers to explore the delineation between the ‘performing-self’ & identity and where these two ideas lie in relation to the self.

Dominic Byrne is a Sydney-based artist who uses both performance and studio- based models of art making to investigate the modes by which people constitute themselves and others online. Originating in video-based performance, Byrne’s practice has recently begun to encompass minimalist-inspired sculptures and wall paintings, linking online representations of desire and queerness within an aesthetic operated by its self-consciousness and physical reality.

Tittering between the ordinary and monstrous, the works share a sense of familiarity pierced by an idiosyncratic eeriness. Parry’s ersatz archaeological installation uses everyday objects that stand in for unfamiliar histories, creating deliberate misinterpretations of a ‘human narrative’. The discord of materials used by Tubb’s creates an irksome clash of high and low culture, the eeriness of internet imagery in its anonymity and simultaneous ubiquity, violate the delicacy of the silk they are printed on. Reid’s subtle curation of familiar parts forms an unsettled whole, while the distorted & fragmented bodies of Hammonds paintings are made somehow more ominous by the rich & painterly use of oil paint with which they are represented.

The show places these works together with the aim that the audience experience this feeling of a violated ordinariness and how the materials used by the artists communicate this theme.

Plastic celebrates the sense of fulfillment and freedom that the act of adorning a mask can allow. For Skelon a mask enables a person to actualise their desires; and to morph into a fantastical reincarnation of them self.

The show was first conceived as an exhibition of ‘works on paper’, but more broadly incorporates the idea of the works that are preliminary to the larger praxis of the artist. These are, perhaps, works not generally displayed as final pieces, and show a new facet of each artist’s idiosyncratic way of making.

This year we lost a beloved friend and peer. Brandon Trakman. He was, beyond all things, an artist. An artist who inspired, who challenged and who made us want to be better. This exhibition is for him.

Since the gallery's closure in July this year, Mils Gallery has been making a mega-catalogue of sorts, which covers the 70+ exhibitions that took place at Mils over its 7 year life span. MILS BOOK: A History of Mils Gallery, 2009-2016 includes over 450 artworks by over 120 artists, as well as two long-form essays by Anna Georgia Mackay and Vladimir Kravchenko about the gallery and that.

The book has been printed with two different covers, one designed by h.j.huwman, and another by Eko Bambang WIsnu. The body of the book was designed by Indonesian artist - Irfan Hendrian.

There are currently only 70 books left, so anyone extra keen to lock down a book before the launch can purchase it on http://milsgallery.com/

It doesn't matter if you have NFI about NRL; lace up your boots, fire up some Tina Turner and get ready for...

THE FOOTY SHOW

Come on down to 103-105 Oxford Street (above the 7/11) at 6:00 PM, Friday 30th September when Lilac City Studio presents a group exhibition dedicated to the high Shakespearian drama of the greatest game on Earth.